I’ve picked an auspicious-as-fuck time to start blogging again, apparently! It’s the third month (feels like the third year) of the COVID-19 pandemic and I’ve had to adjust to some fairly serious changes in my daily routine. Gone are the days of multiple coffee shop visits, though I still drive aimlessly around town from time to time. I’m honestly not even sure what I want to accomplish with this new post, but I’ve not written in so long and I just feel the need to put something out there. From what I can tell, the last post I wrote was about the ordeal of visiting my family for Thanksgiving. I suppose I’ll try and summarize what’s been going on since then, as far as I can remember.
By the time the holidays came around, my motivation at work was at an all-time low. I really just wanted to get fuck out of there for the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. I honestly don’t even remember much of what was going on then, though I was at least journaling regularly. Most days consisted of dragging myself to work, half-assing my way through something resembling a lesson, or having the kids works on Khan Academy while I sat at my desk. There were lots of rambling lectures about life and society and things like that. Suffice it to say, I was really not giving it my all. I took quite a few mental health days leading up to Spring Break. Several of those days I just didn’t feel like getting out of bed, but one time Kara and I went on a fossil hunting trip with HMNS. I’ve never been the type to feel guilty about missing work, but it feels even more respectable when you’re doing something cool on your day off.
As Spring Break approached, it was clear that this coronavirus thing was some real shit. On that fossil trip, we met with the others at a McDonald’s outside College Station and I recall thinking it was like a bad movie: all of us going about our lives while CNN ran on TVs in the background talking about the outbreak of some new virus. Halfway through the break we learned we wouldn’t be returning to school for an unspecified period of time and began making plans to start offering online instruction. I’m not going to go into all the specifics here, but I will sum up what the next two months were like. Several times a week I had to sit through painful online meetings that were completely pointless. I would occasionally post things on Google Classroom and post things for my students to ponder. I’m almost embarrassed to have collected a paycheck during that time: the paucity of effort I put into it was notable even for me.
Most of that time was spent slowing coming to the realization that I was never going to get into real estate. I kind of hate people and the idea of somehow pretending to give a shit about then while guiding them through a home sale just became more and more absurd. I finally admitted to myself that wasn’t going to happen and felt a great deal of anxiety lift off my shoulders. I agreed to teach for another year, but I really don’t know if that’s going to happen. At the moment, Houston is getting fucked with a major spike in COVID cases and I can’t really see school opening safely this fall. Of course, Texas state leadership being what it is, no one at that level has the courage to mandate masks or enforce any real safety measures, they are going to leave it up to the districts to make the unpopular decisions. Unfortunately, I don’t fully trust the district to enforce their own policies either. At this point I’m just waiting for some information from somewhere before I make any decisions.
The obvious question is what will I do if I don’t resume teaching in the fall. Around the same time the shit hit the fan with COVID I started trading options, mostly to pass the time. I’ve done pretty well, building a fairly diverse portfolio for selling covered calls. Granted, things are volatile, but I’m cautiously optimistic that this is a viable income stream. If I choose to quit teaching, I can take the money I have in TRS and add it to my portfolio. If I was debt-free, I have no doubt that this would be enough to keep the lights on. That’s not to say I want to rely on a single income stream, but my choices are limited in the middle of this pandemic.
One of the biggest concerns I have these days is hardly a new one: I have no fucking clue what I’m doing with my life. I have vague impressions of things that would be nice: a house out in the country, with a bit of land, so I can enjoy my pets and my plants and life peacefully. I worry I’d go fucking crazy with boredom, but it’s honestly not too dissimilar from what I’m doing now. I’ve kind of given up on the idea of fitting into society. Dating, especially the last few years, has been nothing more than a painful joke. I kind of hate everything, or near enough. Once this shit is over, I’d like to be able to travel, see more of this world, but over all there aren’t many joys left for me out there.
A common joke, at least at the beginning of the outbreak and subsequent lock-down, was that the real COVID-19 is the 19lbs you gained while cooped up at home. There’s a lot of truth to that. I’ve gotten even more fucking fat over the last few months. I expect I’ll likely have an entire entry about that sometime soon. It doesn’t help that staying home, watching Netflix, reading books, and playing video games is really all there is to do right now, but couple that with my unhealthy relationship with food and things start getting really bad.
I wish I had something more interesting to write about, but I feel like I have nothing to share anymore. I’ve tried getting in touch with friends during all this and I’ve found that I literally have nothing to say to most people anymore. Nothing seems important, everything is bullshit, and I’m mostly just trying to stay afloat. I haven’t been journaling much at all either. In fact, one of the few positive things is that I have made myself go out for several walks recently. I’ve probably walked more in the last month than I did all last year.
I think I’m going to wrap this up here. This is probably the shittiest post on this blog, but it doesn’t really fucking matter. I’m not doing this for an audience. Maybe one of these days I’ll be disciplined enough to write seriously and then I can worry about the quality of my output. For now, at least, it’s enough that I’m even bothering to put down words. It’s enough that I’m bothering with anything at all, really.
